


Needs Must

by Delphi



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Age Difference, Brief Underage Fantasy, Caretaking, Class Issues, Cross-Generation Relationship, Implied Underage Attraction, M/M, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-03
Updated: 2014-11-03
Packaged: 2018-02-21 20:06:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2480741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/Delphi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"This isn't so much an arrangement as it is...a state of affairs." A slice of life from Severus's first year teaching.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Needs Must

There's a match on: Ballycastle and Cork. 

Filch has a complicated silver antenna twisted into amplifying runes and suspended precariously outside his window. The resulting reception is clear and crisp enough to make Severus forget for a while that he's at Hogwarts. This is one of the few rooms in the castle that feels permanently lived in, with the smell of strong tea and tobacco ground into every worn surface. It's warmer than Severus's apartments, owing to its modest size and the unadulterated fire, built up with nothing but dry wood and lit by match to burn fast but hot.

The battered couch sags beneath him when he slouches down. He sighs.

If he closes his eyes, he's six years old again, bored and curious in equal measure as he infiltrates the gathering of his father's friends. Manchester City is winning, and the men are laughing, and Severus is fidgeting under a cloud of smoke, wishing they would pay attention to him. His father casually swats him out of his seat to go fetch more drinks from the kitchen.

"Ballycastle in possession—quaffle up the pitch to Whelan, now to Clery, back to Whelan—"

Filch hooks an arm around Severus's legs and pulls his feet up into his lap. 

"Bugger off," Severus says, letting his knee jab awkwardly into Filch's side. "I'm trying to listen."

But he takes a certain novel satisfaction in being more interesting than the game, and he makes no further protest when Filch's hand settles decisively on his thigh. Over the course of the next few minutes, his robes are unbuttoned, his undershirt is pushed up, and his pants are dragged halfway down. He chews on the inside of his lip, looking at his stiffening cock in Filch's raw-knuckled grip.

This isn't so much an arrangement as it is...a state of affairs.

The fact that he keeps sleeping with Filch seems, in its own way, as arbitrary as the assignment of his apartments and the details of his class schedule. Like being a teacher, this has required nothing but recurrent inaction on his part, and the only difference is that there's pleasure to be found in letting Filch have his way with him.

Sex, he's discovered, feels better than anything else in the world. 

He thought it might, given its reputation. But up until recently, he had wondered if it wasn't just one of those things, like flying or charitable giving, that the unimaginative had agreed to agree was rewarding unto itself. It really isn't. Decoupled from the agony of love and the anxiety that paralyzed his adolescent fumbling, sex is a revelation. He's left nearly breathless by the excitement in his stomach as he's turned over and buggered vigorously over the arm of the couch. His head hangs down, his hair in his eyes as Filch drives into him over and over again.

He locks his throat to keep from moaning. His own voice grates on him, but the feeling of being split open and stroked off is only enhanced by the sound of heavy breathing and grunts of effort above him. The harsh noises are percussed with the creaking of leather and the clinking of the hanging belt buckle that taps against his leg on every second stroke. 

Cork lands the snitch and he misses it. 

Afterwards, he stays where he is for a long while, savouring the pounding of his heart and the lingering throb in his loins as the animated commentary on the wireless breaks through the rush of coursing blood. He gives himself vertigo when he straightens up. 

"Wasn't that good a match anyhow," Filch says, passing over his handkerchief.

"I wouldn't know," Severus replies sharply, wiping his spunk off the couch, "having been made to miss the best part."

Filch gestures at him—a vague threat to give him the back of his hand for cheek—but Severus only flicks the dirty handkerchief back at him and buttons up.

He never did get in the habit of taking Filch's menacing seriously. At age eleven, this set him apart from his schoolmates. Unlike the rest of the toddling first-year cohort, he arrived at Hogwarts well-accustomed to brusque, blustering men who griped and grumbled and promised to tear a strip off your hide for misbehaving. The teachers were the ones who made him nervous, with all their benign smiling and their oily-smooth way of speaking. His fellow students were little better, chattering in a language he only halfway understood.

Severus had always hoped that going to Hogwarts would be like stepping into a storybook, or the perfect, polished world of the cinema, and it was. What he had not anticipated was that he would be the only one without his lines written down for him. 

Filch was reassuringly ordinary in contrast to everything else at the school, and avoiding his wrath was only common sense: don't walk over a patch of freshly mopped floor, don't shout, don't slam doors. 

He tried to communicate this to his giggling classmates as they exchanged lurid tales in the common room about Filch's alleged torture chamber. He was glad to know something they didn't, even if it was only the difference between someone who would really hit you and someone who was only trying to get through the day without a headache. His explanation was met with scorn, and even though he knew he was right, he shut his mouth, afraid the others would know he didn't really belong there.

Age eleven or age twenty—it’s all the same. He finally resorted to knocking on the door of Filch's office on his second day of teaching, having wasted his entire evening rummaging through every supply cupboard in the dungeons. His robes were streaked with dust as he stood resentfully before the caretaker's desk, fingers ink-smudged from clutching his supply list in an increasingly sweaty hand.

"What's that when it's at home, then?"

Severus didn't appreciate it at the time, but this would later turn out to be the first useful question anyone had posed to him since his return to Hogwarts.

For an instant he was tempted to repeat the word "condensers" slower and louder, but he was aware even in his frazzled state that Filch was his last hope. All of his purported colleagues were waiting to see him fall on his face. He was the mad emperor's horse appointed to the senate and they knew it. His orientation had consisted of being handed a set of keys and the vague assurance that "Horace" had left some notes somewhere, and he expected his former teachers would be only too pleased to see him come crawling to them in ignorance.

Instead, gritting his teeth, he held his hands eighteen inches apart and then sketched a circumference with his thumb and finger. "A cylindrical glass tube with a smaller glass coil inside. There ought to be at least twenty of them."

Filch squinted up at the ceiling as if reviewing some mental catalogue and then nodded to himself and promptly led Severus to the third-floor cupboard where Professor Flitwick had apparently locked up everything his Ravenclaws were wont to pinch for the purpose of still-making. 

"But it's _Potions_ equipment," Severus protested, feeling the need to defend the fact that he had just spent four hours looking for the bloody things.

"Yes, sir," Filch said, taking down the box for him.

"Should it not be in the dungeons, where the _Potions_ classroom is?"

"Yes, sir." 

"I wasn't even given a key to this cupboard," he pointed out.

"Well now, sir," Filch muttered, and sniffed. "It'll be a long wait if you hold your breath for any fucking common sense around here."

Severus managed to startle himself with the sound of his own laughter, which was pitched slightly too high and sharpened to the edge of hysteria with too little sleep. 

Filch snorted. His stubbled cheek twitched in a half-smile.

"Come on," he said, prying Severus's list out of his death grip. "Let's see where they went and hid the rest of your things on you."

That's how it is. "Come on," and "There you go," and "Good man." 

Filch tells him about the standing account at Potage's and about the reimbursement forms, and how to keep the house-elves out of his rooms when he needs privacy. He tells him not to bother raising any concerns with Dumbledore, but to put them in writing and give them to McGonagall instead if he actually wants anything done, and he tells him how Flitwick can be counted upon to second any motion in a staff meeting if you call on him suddenly, to hide the fact that he’s been working on a crossword puzzle behind his notes and hasn’t really been listening.

The tone Filch takes with him alternates between deferential and cajoling, but his hands are always insistent, whether straightening out the collar of Severus's robes or hauling him into bed. They leave no room for error or doubt, and Severus bows to greater experience—to the push at the small of his back or on his shoulder, urging him down. He allows his hair to be pulled and fingers to curl under his chin, guiding him through the mechanics of his first attempt at fellatio.

"Go on, lad. Just a little more, now. Good at that, aren't you?"

It was the early hours of All Souls', and Severus—humiliated at having had it brought to his attention by Professor McGonagall that he could not account for the whereabouts of his students—had ended up in a bitter exchange of complaints with Filch about the idiocy and low moral character of giggling, hormone-addled students.

On the surface, it might seem the height of hypocrisy to then end up sprawled across a desk with Filch's hand shoved down his pants, but that isn't how Severus remembers it. What followed wasn't a diversion from their shared grievance but a logical conclusion. There is nothing else to do, when in the employ of children, but to indulge in what few freedoms are denied to the little bastards.

Gratifyingly, the first time left deep marks: red imprints of teeth throbbing around his nipples and a long, thin bruise where the edge of the desk dug into his thighs. More subtle but just as slow to fade was the soreness in his lower stomach, the muscles there worked to full strength for the first time in his life from screwing his hips down on Filch's cock, desperately chasing after that wrenching twist of ecstasy that rendered him barely able to speak.

"Bloody hell," Filch murmured in his ear afterwards, holding on to him, hoarse-voiced and breathing hard. "Bloody hell. D'you know how long I've wanted to do that to you?"

It makes the lateness of his education more bearable to be assured that he could have lost his virginity at least four years earlier, with little difference in the details. He thinks about that sometimes when they're together, particularly on the occasions when Filch is pressed up behind him and mouthing at the back of his neck. He imagines himself in sixth year, so perpetually randy he feared something was wrong with him—alone in some dark corner of the castle, his cheek against the cold stone and an immovable weight pinning him down.

_"Shh. Don't say a word." A hand gropes between his legs. His robes are pulled up and his pants are yanked down, and he is aroused to the point of heart-pounding nausea when greased-up fingers force their way inside him. "You'll like it, you'll see. Just keep your mouth shut."_

"You were a good lad," Filch insists. "Not like this lot. You were respectable, always going about with your nose in a book."

Severus was not a good lad. He's under no delusions on that front. He did far worse things in his time as a student than the everyday curfew-breakers and vandals who earn detentions under Filch's watch. But it's true that he was often reading, and he was quiet, and he did not make a mess. He remembers noticing the way Filch watched him on a few occasions, and the way it amused him to make himself look particularly studious and harmless for as long as Filch's attention was on him. 

At the time, he thought of it as an investment in plausible deniability should Filch ever catch him trespassing. Now, he wonders how long he might have kept up the act if Filch had been watching him all the time—whether the dumb show of piety might somehow have stood in for piety itself, if Filch never took his eyes or his hands off him.

"Good timing, that," Filch says, his arm slung across the back of the couch as they listen to the after-match coverage. His fingertips are resting lightly on the side of Severus's neck. "Dinner's in an hour."

"I am capable of reading a clock, thank you," Severus replies.

"Got time for tea," Filch says. He rubs his thumb back and forth a few times under the edge of Severus's collar before planting his hand on the couch and pushing himself to his feet with a groan of effort.

It's the meal on offer, not a cup—and it is a statement, not a question. Severus therefore doesn't feel the need to answer him. Fucking works up an appetite, and he never quite manages to eat his fill at dinner these days. Only students take second helpings, and Severus is inevitably the first to finish at the head table, pushing around empty air with his fork while his more sedate colleagues pick daintily over a single slice of roast beef and a scoop of mash. 

The Quidditch report gives way to advertisements, and he stops paying attention. With the couch to himself, he stretches out on his back and closes his eyes. Over in the little nook that serves as a kitchen, a knife saws through the crust on a loaf of bread. Water fills the kettle. He can hear the tell-tale crinkle of the cellophane sliding off the cardboard on a cheap packaged cake, the kind with vividly pink gelatinous cherries and a coffin of sickly sweet royal icing. 

The skillet sizzles, and soon enough the smell of salt and fat fills up the room as the present state of affairs sees fit to bring a bacon sandwich into his life.

**Author's Note:**

> Please show your appreciation for the author here, or on [LIVEJOURNAL!](http://hp-crossgenfest.livejournal.com/7583.html) ♥


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